9o THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
of the Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of Rome.
•• The exploitation of the Church bzJ&e^Papacy, and
the exploitation of the peasant and the craftsman by
the capitalist, are thus two horns of the beast which
sits on tKFseven hills. Both are essentially pagan, and
the sword which will slay both is the same. It is the
religion of the Gospel. The Church must cease to be
an empire, and become a congregation of believers.
Renouncing the prizes and struggles which maEe the
heart sick, society must be converted into a band of
brothers, performing in patient cheerfulness the round
of simple toil which is the common lot of the descendants
of Adam.
The children of the mind are like the children ofjtlie
bjady* Once born, they grow by a law of "theiF own
being, and, if their parents could foresee their future
development, it would sometimes break their hearts.
Luther, who has earned eulogy and denunciation as
the grand individualist, would have been horrified,
could he have anticipated the remoter deductions to
be derived from his argument. Wamba said that to
forgive as a Christian is not to forgive at qJJ, and a
cynic who urged that the Christian freedom expounded
by Luther imposed more social restraints than it
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removed, would have more affinity with the thought
of Luther himself, than the libertarian who saw in his
teaching a plea for treating questions of economic
conduct and social organization as spiritually indifferent.
Luther's revolt against authority was an attack, not
on its rigour, but on its laxity and its corruption. His
individualism was not th^greed! '^of the plutocrat,
eager to snatch from the weakness of public authority
an opportunity for personal gain. It was the ingenuous
enthusiasm of the anarchist who hungers for a
society in which order* and fraternity will reign with-
out " the tedious, stale, forbidding ways of custom,
law and statute," because they well up in all their
native purity from the heart.